{‘I spoke total gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for a short while, saying complete nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
